After he and Commander Troy Simms had requisitioned the radio room of the USS Theodore Roosevelt to set up a scrambled voice link with the Commander Submarine Force, United States Pacific Fleet — COMSUBPAC — Rear Admiral Bernard Clarey, things had happened fast. By Saturday morning Walter had been on his way east to be personally ‘debriefed’ by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Anderson.
‘I have spoken with Commander Simms by secure land line,’ the great man had told him as he came around his desk, and to Walter’s surprise and consternation, had solemnly shaken his hand. ‘Commander Simms informs me that you have conducted yourself impeccably in this affair, Lieutenant.’
‘I have done my duty to the best of my ability, sir.’
The Chief of Naval Operations — God to a junior officer in the US Navy — had ordered him to sit in a chair beside him and to tell him ‘everything that happened from the moment the Theodore Roosevelt tied up alongside the Hunley?’
This Walter had endeavoured to do over the course of the next two hours as Saturday afternoon had become dusk and then night over the Pentagon. It was a blur, in the end his voice was hoarse and his nerves stretched so taught he had to continually remind himself to take the next breath. Admiral Anderson had treated him with paternal patience, interrupted sparingly, perhaps aware of how nervous the younger man was in his august presence.
Walter’s subsequent interview — or more correctly, interrogation — by two senior Navy Special Investigation Branch officers, late on Saturday night had been less civil, positively relentless. He had been accommodated in a basement berth in the Navy Wing of the Pentagon overnight, expecting to face further ‘interviews’ in the morning. However, after an early breakfast he had been summoned to the room of a Captain in the Personnel Division and handed orders sending him on leave. Orders as to his future assignment would be cut in the coming days. He could expect to be temporarily employed in a ‘training role’ ahead of taking his place on the next ‘Command Course’ at Groton scheduled to commence in late March or early April. It was emphasized that he was not to discuss the events of the recent days — under any circumstances — with anybody until such time as Hell had frozen over.
Walter looked into Gretchen’s brown eyes. His mother had assured him that the stories about her and United States Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach were ‘all lies’; and ‘part of some horrible feud between Mr Katzenbach and the FBI!’
“It can’t be very nice reading about yourself in the papers?” He offered sympathetically.
“I thought it would be more upsetting than it actually is,” the woman replied. “Dan says in a couple of years everybody will remember my name but nobody will remember why. No publicity is bad publicity, I suppose.”
Walter viewed Gretchen with thoughtful eyes. She was reclining languidly in his father’s chair, dressed in an expensive dress that only just covered her knees, and wearing shimmering nylons advertised her trim calves and ankles. She returned his scrutiny cat-like. They were alike; each quick to form an opinion of another, wary and looking to the future because they were both people with big, ambitious plans and carefully prepared road maps to help them get to where they wanted to get to in the years to come.
“I don’t make friends easily,” he admitted. “I joined the Submarine Service to command my own boat. That’s my ambition. That is my life. There is no room in my life either for a wife, or for other attachments.”
Gretchen had not expected such a categorical rebuff.
“That’s your plan?” She asked before she could stop herself.
He nodded.
“What’s your plan? Where do you want to be in twenty years from now, Gretchen?”
She laughed involuntarily.
“I want to be the first woman to be President!”
It was said jokingly, a throw away riposte but voicing it was strangely cathartic; as if she had just discovered the thing she most wanted, an impossible dream towards which she might struggle for a lifetime. A dream that was so all-consuming, no noble that it instantly granted her existence meaning and justified any sacrifice.
Walter smiled ruefully.
“When I’m the Chief of Naval operations and you’re the President I’m sure we’ll put the World to rights, Miss Betancourt!”
Chapter 28
Governor Albert Rosellini was exhausted and although he would not admit it, heartbroken. Washington lay half in ruins under martial law, and now Boeing was shutting down both its plants in Seattle. It was only a matter of time before the Hanford Works on the Columbia River followed Boeing’s example. In the short term that would be less of a blow than the aircraft manufacturer’s departure, but yet another cruel nail driven into the coffin of Washington State.
William McPherson ‘Bill’ Allen, the sixty-three year old President of the Boeing Company had come to Olympia to deliver the bad news in person. Both men had known it was only a matter of time but neither had anticipated the axe would fall so soon.
For Bill Allen the decision was a devastating personal body blow. He had been with Boeing in one capacity or another since 1930 and had been the corporation’s President since as long ago as September 1945. Born in Lolo, Montana he had graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1925, become a member of Donworth, Todd and Hughes, a prominent Seattle law firm before taking a post on the board of Boeing Air Transport in 1930, and becoming counsel to the Boeing Airplane Company in 1931. His association with Boeing had been unbroken in the intervening decades. He was ‘Mr Boeing’, the man who in the 1950s had famously ‘bet the company’ on the development and construction of the prototype Boeing 367-80 — Dash 80 — the forerunner of the Boeing 707.
“I’m sorry, Al,” the Boeing man apologised, grey with worry and age. “General LeMay went to the wall on this one but the Treasury cut us dead. The Air Force refused to back away from its requirement for the production of a small number of replacement aircraft to keep the production lines turning over but after the Treasury red-pencilled that proposal, trying to get anybody apart from the West Coast representatives in the House to support the company was pissing in the wind,” he shrugged, “if you’ll forgive my language, sir.”
Al Rosellini guffawed sadly.
A lot of people had been pissing in the wind lately.
“Nobody’s flying anywhere these days,” Bill Allen continued. “Leastways, not enough civilians are flying for any of the airlines to buy any more seven-oh-sevens. Pan Am, United and the other big carriers have already parked half their fleets. With no Air Force orders likely for the next couple of years Boeing is in a fix, Al.” He shook his head, and added confidentially: “You know I had to halt development of the new seven-two-seven a month ago?”